Responses
This doesn't mean that the consent in some of the scenes isn't questionable.
Laws won't always cover all the details that's why they change.
what did I just read
Not here to educate strangers who already think they know everything- but before you talk about rape, can you please define that legally? Nothing Ian ever did was non-consensual sex, all right? First of all:
1. Rape is counted from the moment the first act happens WITHOUT CONSENT. And without consent means the person did something to showor express his/her REFUSAL TO PARTICIPATE in the act. Whether or not the refusal was effective in barring the person, there must be a refusal to do it... and the corresponding response on the part of the offender to continue the act despite the refusal of the other person.
2. Consequently, the fact that Eunsan was already sleeping NEXT to Ian after being intimate with him not once but many times that night is definitely NOT a sign of refusal. Lack of consent and refusal to commit the act go together- that is why consent alone cannot be the ONLY way of ascertaining whether an act is il/legal or un/ethical. In fact, Ian or any other BL character for that matter would've still been culpable of rape had that person acted on the basis of vitiated consent- meaning the consent was acquired by deception, manipulation, or any tactic that puts the other person at a disadvantage and makes him/her more likely to let the offender have his way. This is what you have in Jinx, Even if You Don't Love Me, etc. where the other person is definitely put in a compromising situation so that the offender can commit acts of intimacy with the consent of the victim even if the victim considers the situation to be abusive and consistently feels the abuse one way or another DESPITE HAVING GIVEN CONSENT.
As you can see giving consent is NOT EVEN THE ISSUE- because if consent is acquired unethically or forced upon the person through intimidation it is still rape.
It therefore follows that rape is not predicated simply on lack of consent but REFUSAL of the other person to participate in acts of intimacy initiated by another. In the case of Melting Point, Ian didn't even "initiate" the act but was given more than enough encouragement by Eunsan to participate in it. As a case in point, it was Eunsan himself who gave Ian the condoms, was the one who told Ian he could get it hard as MANY TIMES as he wanted if he could win the game, etc- and even gave him actual instructions as to how to pleasure him during the actual act of sexual intimacy. If you call that rape, you must not only be ignorant of the law but don't know the ENTIRE CONTEXT of human relationships in which sex is just a minimal part.
3. Eunsan falling asleep AFTER SEX and Ian continuing to do it during that time is NOT CRIMINAL- because in the law, rape happens only when the person has the criminal intent to take advantage of a person's weakness during sleep to have acts of intimacy with him/her. Clearly, Ian didn't wait for Eunsan to fall asleep JUST SO HE COULD USE HIS BRUTE STRENGTH TO OVERPOWER HIM and commit the act.
4. Before crying rape and pretending you're woke enough to understand what rape is from what it is not, understand this about ANY CRIME- a crime such as rape is LEGALLY DEFINED AS A CRIME IF THE OFFENDER has an actual INTENT TO COMMIT A CRIME. The INTENTION TO RAPE MUST BE ESTABLISHED BY FACTS- not by presumptions- and if there is no intention to begin with, there is no crime.
And yes, there are a lot of romanticized rape in BL- sad to say- but saying that Melting Point commits it just because there's no explicit consent every five seconds is being an absolute idiot with no grasp of the LAW or the LARGER CONTEXT of human intimacy.
I take it further and say these "fake" critics lost all common sense and failed to grasp the difference between lack of consent and refusal to participate... as well as the intention to commit rape and the actual intimacy where that intention is completely absent. Implied consent is something that happens AFTER EXPLICIT CONSENT and is considered VALID CONSENT unless the person does or says something to WITHDRAW or DISCONTINUE.
If you don't know that, well, now you do.